Lux Aeternas by Two Composers: Sacred and Profane in the Context
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
P. TRDAN • LUX AETERNAS BY TWO COMPOSERS ... UDK 783.29: 785 DOI: 10.4312/mz.50.2.273-278 Primož Trdan Radio Slovenija, Tavčarjeva 17, 1550 Ljubljana Radio Slovenia, Tavčarjeva 17, 1550 Ljubljana Lux aeternas by Two Composers: Sacred and Profane in the Context of Genre Individualisation Lux aeterna dveh skladateljev: sakralno in profano v luči zvrstne individualizacije Prejeto: 2. januar 2013 Received: 2nd January 2013 Sprejeto: 27. marec 2013 Accepted: 27th March 2013 Ključne besede: Lux aeterna, György Ligeti, Ta- Keywords: Lux aeterna, György Ligeti, Tadeja deja Vulc, glasba 20. stoletja, zvrst, individualizacija Vulc, 20th century music, genre, individualisation umetniškega dela of an artwork IZVLEček ABSTRACT Prispevek se dvema skladbama z naslovom Lux Two pieces, both titled Lux aeterna, are works by aeterna, deloma Györgya Ligetija in sodobne György Ligeti and contemporary Slovenian composer slovenske skladateljice Tadeje Vulc, posveča sko- Tadeja Vulc. The paper offers some thoughts on two zi prizmo glasbene zvrsti. Takšen pristop se zdi pieces through the notion of genre. This point of view primeren že zaradi Ligetijeve posebne obravnave seems appropriate on account of Ligeti’s distinctive sakralnega besedila, predvsem pa zaradi skladbe treatment of the sacred text, but even more on acco- Tadeje Vulc, napisane za simfonični orkester, ki unt of Tadeja Vulc’s work, a symphonic piece, which includes whispering the first words of Lux aeterna. vsebuje šepetanje začetka besedila Lux aeterna. This raises several questions, yet the main dilemma is Vse to sproža več problemskih vozlišč, predvsem how it came to be possible that pieces which originate pa vprašanje, kaj je omogočilo, da lahko skladbi iz from the genre realm of profane can easily embrace posvetnega zvrstnega okvirja prevzemata naslov both title and text that used to mark a communio of in besedilo stavka rekviema. a requiem mass. The fundamental characteristic of genre phenomenon appears to be its heteroge- neity. Genre is defined as a connection of several different factors or criterions. In different historical periods, we find different criterions, on which genre norms were based on, but generally these four groups of factors were and are of most importance: (1) structure and form, (2) presence of text and its origin, (3) instrumentation and (4) performance context or social status. 273 MUZIKOLOŠKI ZBORNIK • MUSICOLOGICAL ANNUAL L/2 The notion of genre, as we understand it today, is historically confined. Its first traces can be found in Johannes de Grocheo’s Ars musicae from the beginning of 14th century, genre later became an important concept in the time of music-print expansion, as it functioned – and still does – as a device of marketing and distributing music, while it was theoretically exposed and presented for the first time in 1739 with Mattheson’s work Der vollkommene Capelmeister. But Hermann Danuser warns us, that this was a time when genre history reached its zenith and that soon after the notion of genre was replaced with idea of musical work as individual entity.1 This individuality was not manifested very clearly until 20th century modernistic project, which is commonly mentioned as a time of complete genre disintegration. Carl Dahlhaus explained how this supposed dis- integration of genre is not a result of one single process, but rather a result of different changes in different genre factors – function, instrumentation, text and form.2 In the 19th century a Requiem mass was already a reasonably well established genre within the concert environment, therefore performance context is not as relevant for the two Lux aeternas in question as other three genre factors. The individualisation of instrumentation is closely connected to the growing awareness of sound-colour, tibral element in music. The orchestra’s growth enabled not only stronger sound but through different instrumental combination provided also more precise differentia- tion of sound-colour configuration.3 As composers began to understand sound-colour as an independent compositional element, equal of harmony, melody, dynamics or articulation, they most likely started to choose instrumentation, which suited their conception best, and not instrumentation, which has previously been a part of inher- ited genre-norm. The position of text, its origin, meanings and symbolism, seems even more important for our problem. Listening habits changed during the 19th century in a way that vocal music – which used to be listened to exclusively in functional relation- ship to the text – became an object of structural or instrumental mode of listening. This led to disintegration of semantic dimension of texts, that were put to music within the context of a post-war New music.4 In several works, composers made use of text exclu- sively as a substratum of sound-nuances. After such step towards understanding of a text’s role, the genre of chosen text ceased to define genre of music, based on this text. It becomes very obvious why, for example, genre identity of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge has no connection to biblical source of the text it includes. This role of text seems to represent a sharp change in genre history, but even more radical changes happened in individualisation of musical forms. This is a process, which took place during the greater part of the 19th century and is a result of changed relationship between music syntax, tonal system and motivic-thematic work. Structural transparency, as observed in the music of classicistic-romantic tradition, is a direct re- sult of functional tonal harmony with regular appearing of harmonic cadences. Rapid evolving of tonal harmony, its more and more remote and unpredictable harmonic 1 Hermann Danuser, “Gattung”, in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 1049. 2 Carl Dahlhaus, “New Music and the problem of musical genre”, in Schoenberg and the New, transl. Alfred Clayton, Derrick Puffett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38. 3 Dahlhaus, “New Music and the problem of musical genre”, 41. 4 Dahlhaus, “New Music and the problem of musical genre”, 36; Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, transl. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkley: University of California Press, 1989), 5-6. 274 P. TRDAN • LUX AETERNAS BY TWO COMPOSERS ... relations and intense working with motifs – all this also redifined musical forms, which, in general, became ever more individual. Such formal individuality reached its radical point in 1950s with total serialism, other structuralistic methods and chance music. One of the sceptics of this development was also György Ligeti, who explained how such methods of musical material organisation abolish all types of established formal norm and cause changes in formal parts, which lose their vector-like functions.5 Ligeti argued that this changed attitude towards form counteract something, which is inherent to the phenomenon of music and musical form, namely, they counteract formal frame of ref- erence. As he analysed a phenomenon of musical form, he drew a distinction between musical form and music as such. For him music itself is a pure time course, while musi- cal form exists as an abstraction. This abstraction comes into being, as we look at musi- cal time course in a retrospective manner. This retrospective characteristic of musical form includes two levels, real musical time and historical musical time, both of which help to define formal frame of reference. Individual vector-like function of each formal section establishes through both of these temporal levels. We can grasp these functions from inner-connections of certain composition, which occur in a real musical time, as well as from connectedness with (or deviations from) other works of a certain stylistic context or tradition line, which exist in a historical musical time frame.6 We can trace these Ligeti’s ideas also in his piece Lux aeterna for 16 solo voices, composed in 1966. Form of this piece is defined with textural contrast between mi- cropolyphony and homophony. Within dominantly polyphonic piece Ligeti inserted two homophonic chord blocks, which define a formal idea on the level of the real mu- sical time, and also trigger references on the traditional choral writing, thus establish- ing the historical temporal connections. Another strong historical reference seems to be Ligeti’s microcanon, a special derivation from a polyphonic technique of imitation. Prefix micro refers to a specific difference from the traditional canon: time distances between voice appearances are much smaller and also the intervallic relations between parts appear to be similarly small. Even though micropolyphony is an important com- positional technique, its result could just as well be understood from the aural perspec- tive – here the audible recognisable and comprehensible technique is not polyphony of 16 voices, it is rather a sense of different sound facture. In Ligeti’s Lux aeterna we do not hear a traditional polyphonic texture, but more likely a kind of surface of vari- ous densities and sound-colour nuances. This is reflected even in vocabulary by which Ligeti operates as he describes new musical syntax from the late 1950s. Rather than through parameters, he explains his ideas with expressions like sound surfaces, sound objects and sound interweaving.7 This aspect is even more important as we examine the role of text in this piece, which was already closely examined in analysis Paul Op de Coul carried out in his ar- ticle Sprachkomposition bei Ligeti: “Lux aeterna”.8 Ligeti’s Lux aeterna is an extremely 5 György Ligeti, [“Über Form in der Neuen Musik”,] Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1966): 28-29. 6 Ibid., 25. 7 Ligeti, [“Über Form in der Neuen Musik”,] 29. 8 Paul Op de Coul, “Sprachkomposition bei Ligeti: “Lux aeterna”. Neben einigen Randbemerkungen zu den Begriffen Sprach- und Lautkomposition”, in Über Musik und Sprache: Sieben Versuche zum neueren Vokalmusk, ed. Rudolph Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1974): 59-69. 275 MUZIKOLOŠKI ZBORNIK • MUSICOLOGICAL ANNUAL L/2 syllabic piece.